The present invention generally relates to data translation, transcription, and/or conversion from a printed form to an electronic form. More specifically, various embodiments of the present invention relate to one or more printed label-to-RFID tag data translation apparatuses and methods.
RFID tags are increasingly becoming standard forms of identification for livestock, agricultural produce, and other food sources and products. In case of livestock farms, a conventional form of identifying an animal in a livestock herd was attaching a paper tag with an identification number on the animal's body part. If the paper tag is to be associated with the animal's vaccination history or any other pertinent dynamically-changing information, it is common practice to attach little paper tabs containing snippets of information to the paper tag itself, which make livestock farm management cumbersome, outdated, and awkward for any computerized information management of animal-specific and/or farm-specific data.
Using an radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag to store animal-specific and farm-specific information enables electronic data storage and retrieval using an RFID reader device. Using RFID tags also make food source information tracking, contamination/disease breakout control, and/or transaction history tracking simpler and easier for a livestock farm or an agricultural producer by leveraging electronic data storage and retrieval capabilities of today's modern information technology (IT) systems.
However, in many cases, conventional RFID tags have to be initialized serially (i.e. one by one), before they are first attached to animals or agricultural products. Because agricultural and livestock regulations of many countries require a unique identification code (i.e. a UID code) to be issued in association with a government IT systems, a typical data initialization procedure of an animal RFID tag or an agricultural product RFID tag requires printing out a UID label and attaching it to a surface of the RFID tag, or printing the UID label directly on a surface of the RFID tag as a silkscreen. Furthermore, in conventional data initialization of RFID tags for livestock and agricultural industry, data initialization also requires a farm worker or another assistant to transcribe the UID code as an electronic UID inside a non-volatile data storage in the RFID tag in a serialized fashion (i.e. one tag after another).
The conventional serialized data initialization procedure for RFID tags is a manual task requiring a farm worker's attention for each RFID tag. Such manual and serialized methods are generally inefficient to handle a high-capacity data initialization of RFID tags for a high-volume livestock farming or a large agricultural operation. Therefore, it may be desirable to devise a novel apparatus which can provide a mostly or entirely automated and efficient data initialization for RFID tags. Furthermore, it may be also desirable to devise a novel method which can provide a mostly or entirely automated and efficient data initialization for RFID tags. In addition, it may also be desirable to improve speed and accuracy of this apparatus and related method with additional novel features.